“You talk a lot about Gandhi’s message, ‘be the change you want to see in the world’, but what are you actually doing about it? How is that actually affecting your life?”

National political leaders underestimate Americans’ capacity for unselfish choices. The current pandering to the baser instincts of fear and resentment over issues like health care or climate change does an injustice to the generosity and good sense of this country.

It’s not often that Switzerland makes the headlines around the world. But frankly, this is publicity that we could have done without! Last weekend, 57% of the Swiss who voted (53% turnout, which is high by Swiss standards) approved a constitutional amendment to bar the building of minarets.

By nature, humans are social creatures with an innate need to belong. At what point did I as a human feel that I had a particular set identity? Did I choose it or was it imposed? Why did I hold onto it? How did it benefit me? And more importantly, was the identity I clung to innocent, or had I fallen into the trap – as so many of us have – of unassumingly donning a politicized identity that others had created?

One of my most poignant memories of Senator Edward Kennedy was not his unforgettable 1972 Halloween night campaign speech in Jersey City attacking President Nixon. Nor was it the tip he gave me for a good story when I was The Cincinnati Enquirer's Washington correspondent.

When I came to live in Richmond 30 years ago, John Coleman, one of my early mentors, told me "You have to build a bridge of trust strong enough to bear the weight of the truth you are trying to communicate."

Paige ChargoisThere is a cry against the predilection of poisonous political rhetoric that only seeks to divide a people committed to being the United States of America.

Obama’s epic presidential campaign climaxed with a rally of 85,000 in Virginia. It was remarkable and fitting that his journey to the White House concluded in the state which led the way in institutionalizing slavery, fought a civil war to preserve it, and promoted Massive Resistance to school integration after one hundred years of Jim Crow segregation.

It feels like we are on an emotional roller coaster these days. Wild swings of the market and a tense political campaign can easily allow us to be controlled by fear, blame and anger or swayed by false hopes and promises that appeal to our self-interest.

Clementine Lue Clark

I was born to Jamaican parents, a Chinese father and Black mother. I grew up in Jamaica being called “de chinney gal” or “Miss Chin.” Then I moved to the United Kingdom and was treated very much like a West Indian immigrant with all of the stereotypes that entails. Now I’m living in the United States happily married to a White American, learning each day about what it is like to be in an interracial marriage. (I’m learning it’s like any other marriage.) In Boston, where I live surrounded mostly by educated people, being in an interracial marriage is quite normal. I have the privilege of rarely thinking about it.